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The Description for this book, Town Planning in Frontier America, will be forthcoming.
As new towns and cities spread across the American frontier in the nineteenth century, itinerant artists soon followed, documenting these growing urban centers by drawing aerial perspectives, also known as bird's eye views. Commissioned by land speculators, local businesses, civic organizations, and individual citizens, these renderings fostered both civic pride and local commerce. The use of color lithography, a recent invention popularized by such prominent publishers as Currier & Ives, allowed the inexpensive reproduction of the highest-quality drawings, so that a bird's eye view was within the financial budget of even the smallest towns. These extraordinarily detailed lithographs eventua...
This comprehensive survey of urban growth in America has become a standard work in the field. From the early colonial period to the First World War, John Reps explores to what extent city planning has been rooted in the nation's tradition, showing the extent of European influence on early communities. Illustrated by over three hundred reproductions of maps, plans, and panoramic views, this book presents hundreds of American cities and the unique factors affecting their development.
Spectacular modern aerial photographs of twenty-three of the towns dramatically illustrate changes to the urban scene and demonstrate the lasting influence of the initial city patterns on subsequent growth.
The Description for this book, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning, will be forthcoming.
Americans imagine the Early West as a vast expanse of almost empty land populated only by farmers, ranchers, cattle, and horses. Now a leading scholar challenges this stereotype with his concise examination of early city planning and urban development in the region. Extending and elaborating on studies by Carl Bridenbaugh and Richard Wade of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Ohio Valley, John Reps demonstrates that throughout the Trans-Mississippi West cities and towns, not farms and ranches, formed the vanguard of frontier settlement. Urban communities thus stimulated rather than followed the opening of the West to agriculture. These cities did not grow randomly, for their founders established patterns of streets, lots, and public sites to guide expansion as population increased. Reps supports his thesis with 100 illustrations-plans, maps, surveys, and views-showing the original designs of every major Western city and of dozens of smaller places. Based on Reps's massive Cities of the American West (winner of the Beveridge Prize in 1980), this succinct account includes extensive notes and references that will be useful to readers who wish to pursue his penetrating critique.
Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects – screenshots, tagging, selfies and more – the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, it investigates how the ‘given’ world we inhabit is given through media. This book is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.
City views and bird's eye views of selected cities provide examples of 19th century toned and hand colored lithography.
This comprehensive survey of urban growth in America has become a standard work in the field. From the early colonial period to the First World War, John Reps explores to what extent city planning has been rooted in the nation's tradition, showing the extent of European influence on early communities. Illustrated by over three hundred reproductions of maps, plans, and panoramic views, this book presents hundreds of American cities and the unique factors affecting their development.